Irish actors often get their big breaks in gruelling parts, whether it’s Michael Fassbender in the H-block body-horror Hunger or Cillian Murphy fleeing zombies in 28 Days Later. But such examples pale compared to the bleak true-crime drama The Sixth Commandment (BBC One, Monday, 9pm), which is built around the Cork newcomer Éanna Hardwicke and his grimly authentic performance as the convicted murderer Ben Field.
Field was a polite and devout young man who inveigled his way into the lives of two vulnerable older people in bucolic Buckinghamshire. They were the academic and author Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall), who he drugged and killed, and the retired school principal Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid), who Field, as he had with Farquhar, tricked into changing her will. In 2019 he was jailed for at least 36 years for the crimes that this four-part drama, written by Sarah Phelps, lays out in unflinching and sometimes upsetting detail.
Hardwicke is best known as one of the hometown pals of Paul Mescal’s character in Normal People. As Field, he gives a masterclass in creepy understatement. He feigns concern for the lonely and repressed Farquhar, posing as the soul mate the older man has longed for. They move in together, and friends notice a change in Farquhar. He becomes distracted during lectures. Field, meanwhile, expresses concern about the older man’s destructive drinking.
Spall is wonderful as Farquhar, a man of great passion and intellect, but who has, with age, become defined by his loneliness. Field offers to save him from that isolation, gaslighting and seducing him.
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Field likewise brings chaos to the life of Moore-Martin. She thinks she is going mad when quotes from the Bible appear scrawled on mirrors around her house. At all times Field maintains an air of devout inscrutability. We see him serving as a lay member at his local evangelical church, where he delivers a sermon on the sixth commandment: thou shall not kill.
Phelps is widely acclaimed for her Agatha Christie adaptations, including The ABC Murders and The Pale Horse. She fared less well in bringing to the screen Tana French’s Dublin Murder novels – though she can hardly be blamed for the fatal mistake of filming much of the action in Belfast rather than Dublin. In French’s novels the capital is a character unto itself; its absence from the screen was a kiss of death.
She’s back on form with this slow-burn chiller that honours Field’s victims. The Sixth Commandment is made with the blessing of the families of Farquhar and Moore-Martin, and they are Phelps’s focus. Field, by contrast, is a devil painted with hazy brush strokes. Hardwicke is to be commended for bringing this mundane monster to life without ever coming close to glamorising him.
